Political philosophy, Confucian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Chan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The People ◽  
Natural Tendency ◽  
The Many ◽  
Egalitarian Justice

Confucianism is a tradition of ethical and political thought in which ethics and politics are tightly connected. Confucianism endorses a politics of virtue that can be understood in two ways. First, politics in Confucianism aims to promote certain virtues and social relationships it defines as good; second, Confucianism conceives that politics can be successful only if the people in power are virtuous. Confucian political philosophy is therefore a kind of perfectionism which says that the state should promote the good life, and it is therefore directly opposed to the contemporary liberal view that the state and its officials should take no stance regarding what constitutes the good life. This entry introduces the Confucian vision of politics and explores its implications for three issues, namely: the source of political authority, the scope of people’s rights and liberties, and the responsibilities of the state towards its people’s welfare. The politics of virtue as conceived in Confucianism naturally tends to endorse rule by the wise instead of rule by the many; it tends to stress the need for people to cultivate virtues rather than to enjoy rights and liberties; and it sees people’s care for the poor and needy as stemming from virtues or duties rather than imperatives of social equality or justice. Despite this natural tendency, however, it is not obvious that the politics of virtue leaves no room for democracy, rights, and egalitarian justice. Indeed some commentators have argued that a number of these liberal-democratic ideas are either present in Confucianism or consistent with its central tenets. It is arguable that classical Confucian texts do not contain any ideas of democracy, human rights, or egalitarian justice, but do leave room for endorsement of the first two ideals under certain circumstances.

Introduction: Carl Schmitt's Challenge to Liberalism

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
David Dyzenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Fundamental Values

The collapse of the Weimar Republic (1918-33) haunts political debate these days. Disaffected groups again challenge, with increasing support, the most fundamental values of the liberal democracies. In dealing with the “fact of pluralism” contemporary political philosophy grapples with this challenge. Any attempt to contest conceptions of the good life going against the grain of liberal democratic values invites the charge that liberalism is just one ideology among others, each seeking to enforce upon the whole its own partial idea of the good.

scholarly journals Aristotle on happiness as the highest goal of the state

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 470-482
Author(s):  
Sergey Kocherov
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Form Of Government

The paper explores the key assertion of Aristotelian “Politics” that a state is formed primarily for the good life. Aristotle’s views on the essence, purpose and the best constitution of a state are analyzed in comparison with Socrates’ and Plato’s doctrine of an ideal state. The author investigates an Aristotelian interrelation between people’s understandings of happiness and their choice of a form of government and approval of a state policy. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian idea of a state designed for the good life entered the Western political philosophy paradigm and has exerted a determining influence on the formation of a common good notion and the concept of a welfare state. The paper concludes that the choice between “the Aristotelian state” and “the Platonic state” is not only stipulated by historical and cultural reasons, but is at the same time existential for each nation.

The Open Society and the Democracy to Come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Gain Access

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

A Critique of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism: Morality and Politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Perfectionism

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.

Eudaimonia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.C.W. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Human Good ◽  
External Goods ◽  
Satisfactory Life

The literal sense of the Greek word eudaimonia is ‘having a good guardian spirit’: that is, the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular thought to be the supreme human good. This objective character distinguishes it from the modern concept of happiness: a subjectively satisfactory life. Much ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes the good life: for example, whether virtue is sufficient for it, as Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods are also necessary, as Aristotle maintained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it prevents the achievement of eudaimonia, while its defenders (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or sufficient for eudaimonia. The primacy of eudaimonia does not, however, imply either egoism (since altruism may itself be a constituent of the good life), or consequentialism (since the good life need not be specifiable independently of the moral life). The gulf between ‘eudaimonistic’ and ‘Kantian’ theories is therefore narrower than is generally thought.

Recognition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Honneth
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Different Levels

The concept of recognition has played an important role in philosophy since ancient times, when the good life was thought to depend partly on being held in regard by others. Only Hegel, however, made recognition fundamental to his practical philosophy. He claimed that human self-consciousness depends on recognition, and that there are different levels of recognition: legal or moral recognition, and the forms of recognition constituted by love and the state. A similar tripartite distinction can be used to ground a plausible modern account of ethics.

Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Anthony P. McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Financial Market ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Home Ownership ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
The State ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Income Disparity ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Commercial Property ◽  
Ideological Commitment

This article examines how a specific form of lifestyle programming indexes both national concerns and transnational financial trends as well as diffuse social fissures in Irish life. Emerging in the late 1990s amid a construction boom, Irish property television adapted and thrived through the subsequent post-2008 crash, the concomitant implementation of austerity policies and an ensuing housing crisis. This boom-to-bust cycle was precipitated by the financialization of property within Ireland, a process whereby housing and commercial property became embedded in transnational financial market cycles. Through an analysis of three key examples of the genre, this article argues that for the most part, Irish property television seeks to hold at bay anxieties generated by a growing wealth and income disparity in the state. While this programming displays an ideological commitment to the “investor subjects” of home-ownership, increasingly the concerns of those excluded from this version of the good life are evident.

scholarly journals The Modernity of Aristotle’s Ethics

MANUSYA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Charles Freeland
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theoretical Science

Aristotle understood ethics to be a practical rather than a theoretical science. It is a pragmatics, if you will, concerned with bringing about a good life . But the problem and the question from which Aristotle’s ethics begins arid to which it constantly returns concerns the relation of the theoretical to the practical: his concern is for the type or mode of discourse one could use in providing an account of the good life (Eudaimonia). Is this a propositional, apophantic discourse, a discourse claiming to represent the truth and what is true and from which one could then go on to prescribe a course of action, or, and this may be closer to Aristotle, is the philosophical discourse on ethics rather a descriptive one which takes humankind for what it is, not what it ought to be? This relation between theory and practice, between description and prescription, between science and action, is a question and a problem for Aristotle. It is my purpose to take up this question in connection with Aristotle’s texts on Eudaimonia. Another question shall be raised here: What is the relevance of Aristotle’s treatment of Eudaimonia to our contemporary, “modern” concern for ethics and the good life? I would assume, naively perhaps, that even today we are not indifferent to this question of what is a good life, and that we are not indifferent to the many ways in which the “good life” has been described. It would seem, then, that Aristotle’s texts have a particularly striking importance for us today insofar as we prolong the philosophical questioning of the possibilities for ethical and political discourse today and continue to ask who and what we are as human beings.

Who Gets Power and Why

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ithiel de Sola Pool
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Goals ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Substantive Rationality ◽  
The Government

A Feature of Western ideology, particularly its American variant, is consciousness of tension between ideals and reality. One source of this tension is a propensity to seek social goals by way of adventitious motives. Education seeks marks not knowledge; business seeks profits not products; politics seeks power not the good life. To protest this lack of what Max Weber called substantive rationality, and to demand that first things be put first is labelled “idealism,” while acceptance of the immediate incentive and disregard for the final end is labelled “realism.”Thus in political science the name “realistic” has been largely applied to that tradition which concentrates on power relations and assumes that its subjects behave as “political men,” that is, that they strive to maximize power. The “realist” assumes that all men in politics share the same drive. So deeply ingrained is this identification of politics and power that it appears even in the unconscious where the state is a father symbol. It appears also in everyday idioms where to be in the government is “to be in power” and to go into politics means not to pave streets but to enter a game of hierarchical advancement. It appears also in scholarly thought. Unlike Aristotle, who defined the polis as that association formed for the highest good and which comprehends the rest, most modern scholars find in a monopoly of coercion the distinctive attribute of the state.

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